Happy Beagle Liberation Day

Beagles in Corapeake, NC, lab before PETA liberated them with an undercover video

About a year ago today my beagles’ lives started changing. Huckleberry, Moxie and 200-some dogs and cats were sprung from their filthy cages at Professional Laboratory and Research Services after a PETA undercover video showed staffers slamming the animals around, hosing them, slamming doors on them and letting them live in filth. They’re still recovering, but now they’ve been living a whole year out of that awful Corapeake, NC, lab.

The volunteers drove hours to pick them up, then waited through a strict, strange procedure to pick them up, requiring they not even speak to lab workers, according to an account by Triangle Beagle Rescue: “Some of the dogs dropped to their bellies and crawled as soon as they hit the unfamiliar surface of the parking lot; they looked shy and confused.” The Associated Humane workers said the dogs acted like they’d never seen grass, either.

One of the weird rules at the pick up was that the volunteers couldn’t ask any questions. That’s why I didn’t get any records with the beagles or notion of what experiments they’d been subjected to. Today I finally watched the full, repulsive video.

There’s a shot at the beginning that may be Huck and Moxie–or BOP7 and WQY8 as they were then known by their ear tattoos. The nasty attendant spray them for being “so fucking noisy.”

The beagles today

I’m not sure it’s them. The markings seem the same, but my beagles are pretty quiet. Only Huck sings–and only to play and greet friends. I’d like to think they knew each other there. I am sure, from the way Huck freaks out when he has to walk through narrow passages and Moxie is terrified of water, that they went through similar abuse.

A couple of the dogs released that day ended up essentially dying as a long-term effect of their abuse. They were so terrified of people they ran away from their homes, couldn’t be caught and got hit by cars. We thought Moxie and Huck were happy at first. But now we look back at their faces those first months and read them as scared. Moxie took a month or two to be willing to walk away from our apartment. She still hides behind me sometimes. They took about six months to housetrain.

But sometime around February we started seeing the fantastic beagle smiles we now get to see nearly every day.

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